Thrift, Samantha C.

English

Journals @ The Mount

BOOK REVIEWPower Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances. Aimee Carrillo Rowe. Durham andLondon: Duke University Press, 2008; xix+252 pages; appendices; ISBN 978-0-8223-43117-2; $23.95US (paper).In Power Lines, Aimee Carrillo Rowe taps into contemporary debates over the purpose andvalue of academic feminism’s institutional power, particularly for those marked as“outsiders-within” due to their non-normative racial, gender, or sexual identities. Drawingon twenty-eight interviews with self-described academic feminists (ten women of colour,eighteen white women), Carrillo Rowe investigates the sites of tension and possibilityinforming these women’s varying efforts to form transracial feminist alliances in theirinstitutional environments. She conducts a rigorous rhetorical analysis of these women’sresponses and, in doing so, sheds light on the tangible political conditions which havefostered segregated feminist alliance building within the U.S. academy.A primary objective of this work is to produce a rough methodological mapping of strategiesfor transracial feminist alliance building. Carrillo Rowe persuasively advocates a paradigmshift characterized by feminists’ vulnerable listening (instead of defensive reaction), theembrace of transracial tension (not its denial), and the refusal to take refuge in feminist“innocence” in moments of sisterly betrayal. While these conclusions are not in themselvesrevelatory, the path Carrillo Rowe took to reach them is fascinating. The conversations withher interview subjects reveal, for instance, several white feminists’ inability to verballyarticulate the racialized terms informing their (usually) segregated alliances, while manywomen of colour characterize their “institutional intimacies” (25) more defensively, in termsof professional survival: “‘An ally is someone who won’t block my way’” (154).In a compelling move, Carrillo Rowe emphasizes the affective quality of feminist alliances,which she describes as an interface between intimacy and power. Noting that “whom welove is political,” the author advocates a self-reflexive and compassionate feminist project(called the “politics of relation”). She adeptly negotiates her own relational politics as anAnglo-Chicana queer feminist researcher (or Chicana falsa) throughout the analysis,asking, for instance, in what ways has her identity as a feminist researcher “split bycategories, by worlds and words” (xix) fostered (dis)connections with her interviewsubjects? The author entreats us, as feminist scholars, to (re)consider the politics of ouraffective communities - that is, the people and groups with whom we live, work and makeconnections (25-26) -  and the ways in which those ties risk reproducing hegemonic powerrelations and subaltern identities.34.2, 2009www.msvu.ca/atlantisPower Lines is a significant and timely contribution to the ongoing project of transracialfeminist alliance building, particularly in an American cultural context becoming increasinglyidentified as “post-racial.” By asking how feminist academics can better practice ourpolitics, Carrillo Rowe has produced a study that stands as more than a theoreticalexploration of U.S. third world feminist and postcolonial scholarship (although that is well-represented here). Power Lines is also a valuable tool to guide academic and non-academic activists who are engaging in bridge work at the interstices of identity politics.Samantha C. Thrift McGill University

Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances

https://journals.msvu.ca/index.php/atlantis/article/download/5671/4789

Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances

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